Bear facts about Bigfoot, according to articles in Science (AAAS) News 1 July 2014 and Biology Letters 2 July 2014, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0161. Two years ago scientists at University of Oxford, UK and the Museum of Zoology in Lausanne, Switzerland put out a request for any samples of hair which people claimed to be from creatures known as Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Abominable Snowmen, and any other mysterious elusive, hairy, humanoid creatures believed to live in remote mountainous places.

They received 57 samples from various places, including Washington, Texas, Oregon, Russia, India and Bhutan. Thirty samples had enough DNA to enable species identification using a gene for 12S RNA. One turned out to be human hair, and all others were all from known species of animals: bears, horses, dogs, wolves, cattle, raccoons, deer and a porcupine. The most intriguing find was that two samples from India and Bhutan had a 12S RNA gene that was a match for polar bears. However, the hairs were not white. The India hairs were golden-brown, and the hair from Bhutan was reddish-brown in appearance. Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at Oxford University, hopes to follow up this finding to see if Himalayan bears are a hybrid species with polar bears.

Editorial Comment: Having been in Alaska where hybrids between polar bears and brown bears are well documented, it doesn’t surprise this editor or our team that other bear species show evidence of being closely related to polar bears. Since polar bears are actually ‘degenerate’ bears that have lost their black (they are still totally black under all that ‘translucent hair’) we await with interest the follow up study on bear genetics. However, this one gene does provide more evidence that all species of bears, whether they live in the Himalayas or Arctic coastlines, are descended from one created kind, whose descendants have spread out over the earth fairly recently. (Ref. Ursus maritimus, genetics)